Runway incursions remain a threat to the safety of air travel as jets face risks from collisions with other aircraft as well as vehicles on the tarmac.
An incident occurred at New York’s LaGuardia Airport late Sunday night when an Air Canada Express CRJ-900, operated by the airline’s regional partner Jazz Aviation as Flight 4686, collided with a fire truck while it was landing. The jet carried 72 passengers and four crew members and arrived in New York from Montreal.
The collision killed both the pilot and first officers, according to Jazz and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, while dozens of injuries were reported. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sent a team of experts to investigate the incident.
The tragic accident comes as the public has in recent years become more aware of runway incursions at the nation’s airports, which occur when an aircraft, vehicle or person is incorrectly present in an area designated for the landing and take off of an aircraft.
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Data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) showed that there were 97 runway incursions reported in January of this year – a slight decline from the 133 reported in the same month last year, as well as the 118 incursions in January 2024 and the 123 incursions that were recorded in January 2023.
Of the incursions reported this January, 17 were classified as operational incidents while 56 were attributed to pilot deviation, 22 to deviations by vehicles or pedestrians, and two others were classified as “other” in the FAA’s data.
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Boyd Group International President Mike Boyd told FOX Business that “this incident, as tragic as it is, is an indication of the complexity of running an airport, not so much an indication that we have a sloppy system. It’s just a system that does occasionally fail because ‘I didn’t hear the message.'”
“We’re highly, highly dependent upon humans here. We’re dependent upon the people in the cockpit, we’re dependent upon not just technology but the people in the towers, and sometimes things can fall through,” he said.
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Boyd said the LaGuardia collision and a 2024 incident in Japan when two aircraft collided on the runway show that while such incidents are relatively rare, there are also ways safety systems can be improved to prevent them from becoming a recurring issue.
He added that while there have been instances in which traffic control systems haven’t been as safe as they needed to be at a given moment, it has generally been safe and effective.
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Boyd also said that “we just have to work to make sure we have fewer runway incursions, particularly now that we have the benefit of a lot more scrutiny of when these things happen. We didn’t have that before. We do now – that’s a good thing.”
